After a nice holiday Season sabbatical, I have a few observations about our latest threat to our national psyche, the roots of more to come, a bit of research to share, and, hopefully, a stimulate of thought about what we can do moving forward.
This past decade has brought us what each seems to every ten years...tremendous innovation, creation, and acceleration of free information, content, and potential solutions. The greatest of which must be the exponential growth and reach of the most powerful communication and freedom-feeding beast ever created by many around the globe - the Internet. From Vannevar Bush's first concept to Norbert Wiener and his "cybernetics" to AI research at Dartmouth and on to many real electronic "networking" evolutions over 5+ decades...our Internet of today almost fits all of the conceptual bills of great minds who just needed technologies to catch up.
A very similar catch-up trend has occurred with users of Internet potential as well. We here in North America have more than doubled our numbers of users over the last decade and have almost 75% of our population on-line now, compared to one-third of that, overall, for the world. However, our increase is weak in comparison to the top two regions of growth - the Middle East and Africa, which experienced approx. 16- and 14-fold increases in Internet connectivity over the last decade, respectively (see www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm).
Why is this important?
Well, think about our country and other places of relative political and economic freedoms and those who would like to knock us down a notch or two...or destroy us with one virus, hacker effort, dirty bomb, or worse at a time. The gifts of communication and networking via the Internet have now offered any exporter of hate the same affordable and efficient means to destroy, as Apple has to market it's line of handheld, content solutions.
The next decade holds as many challenges as any before now, as we do our best to harness the power of the Internet for economic growth, community building, content-sharing, and expansion of free thought and democratic ideals (Iran, for example) like never before. However, it also brings the greatest downside potential from those who use this great equalizer of communication to network, train, and destroy. Cyber-terror is so much more than a bad virus taking out your hard-drive and/or email address book. It's a threat to the world that requires everyday folks, web professionals, and governments to pool their collective creativity, web ingenuity, and cyber-solutions to keep ahead of the those who now communicate and organize on-line with greater skill than those we are chasing between caves.
It is, indeed, a very connected world that forces us to take the proverbial bitter with the very, very sweet. This world just needs about one million of us for every one of them, stepping up to notice those on-line, in public places, in positions of influence, and anywhere damage can be done...and be ready to quickly alert authorities when something just does not seem right...preferably before anyone's underwear starts to smoke.
